The Prison Book Club

by Ann Walmsley

  Thus it happened that the original core members of the Collins Bay Book Club came from the Catholic group plus a few mates they’d brought along from their “ranges.” (A range is a row of cells within a cellblock.) Despite its origins, the book club was strictly secular, and I was glad that Carol’s religiosity was not part of it. Carol and her husband bought about twenty copies of Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes for the first book club meeting that August—in 2009. Since then, she had started book clubs in four other federal prisons, including Grand Valley, the only federal women’s prison in Ontario. Many of those books the Finlays had also paid for out of their own pockets.

  As I looked sideways at her at the wheel of her SUV, I could see that she was a smart, creative, determined woman and that five prisons likely would not satisfy her. She complained to me about how hard it was to juggle everything. From the set of her lower lip, it was clear that complaining was part of her process. It was the step just before impatience, where change could happen. In the months to come, I would see that volunteers who didn’t measure up would be gently encouraged to apply their skills elsewhere, prison staff who didn’t return her calls would be phoned back—repeatedly, assistants who bungled book orders would be replaced. Change would lead to success. And she was as fearless of change as she was of the men. I saw that two deep rivers ran inside Carol: compassion for the dispossessed and relentless drive. She was a Christian, but a hard-nosed one. Like Mortenson, Carol was keeping a promise to herself and to Jean Vanier to help the lonely and the marginalized. And maybe a promise to her mother and to Sir George Williams.

  There was a postscript to that month’s book club. Just six weeks later, in April 2011, the mainstream media were echoing Graham’s hunches about Greg Mortenson. In a documentary televised on 60 Minutes, interviewees alleged that Mortenson had exaggerated his benevolent achievements and fabricated parts of his story. Around the same time, Jon Krakauer published Three Cups of Deceit, which detailed Mortenson’s alleged fabrications, including claiming to have built schools that others built, lying about getting lost on K2, misusing donors’ funds and misrepresenting his stay with the Wazir tribesmen as capture.

  Although our book club didn’t know it then, this was only the beginning of two years of misery for Mortenson. Following an investigation by the attorney general of Montana, Mortenson agreed to repay one million dollars to his school-building charity, Central Asia Institute, for travel and other book-related expenses, that the charity had originally funded. Four American readers brought a lawsuit against Mortenson alleging fraud, but a judge dismissed the case about thirteen months after our book club meeting. Seven months after that, Mortenson’s co-author, David Relin, committed suicide by stepping in front of a freight train. His family released a statement through his literary agent saying that Relin had suffered from depression.

  We had an opportunity to regroup with the men on the issue soon after the scandal broke that spring of 2011. Frank, who had heard about the accusations, still stood with Mortenson, saying he thought the criticisms stemmed from “a bit of jealousy.”“Mortenson could achieve with a thousand dollars what the government would need three million to do,” he said.

  Ben pointed out that Mortenson had admitted in Three Cups of Tea that he had “procrastinated” on his accounts. Graham, who had been critical of Mortenson during the initial book club discussion, was now prepared to cut him some slack. “Is there anyone who writes a memoir who doesn’t embellish it or remember it differently from the way it happened or the way it occurred from somebody else’s perspective?” he asked. Now that Mortenson found himself under attack, the men seemed to be more forgiving.

  3

  ARE YOU NORMAL?

  APRIL 2011’S BOOK CLUB MEETING, the first of two meetings on books about disability, came in the midst of a late, rain-filled spring. The Moira River, which I crossed each month on my drive to Kingston, had risen to the top of its banks, its water black and roiling. As I drove over the bridge, I thought of Virginia Woolf and how she had killed herself by walking into a river in East Sussex with stones in her pockets. The topic of suicide was on my mind because it arose in that month’s book, Ian Brown’s 2009 memoir, The Boy in the Moon: A Father’s Search for His Disabled Son.

  Closer to Kingston, the highway passed through limestone rock cuts that were still icicle-laced, as though the rock held the cold longer than the soil. When I arrived at the prison and opened my car door in the parking lot, a chill wind off the lake snapped it from my hands and blew my scarf loose. A few staffers struggled out of their cars and joined me on the two-hundred-metre walk to the front door of the prison. Everybody, not just me this time, was walking with a slight forward tilt as we battled the westerly blasts of freezing air.

  By that point in the evolution of the Collins Bay Book Club, Carol, Derek and I had all figured out our roles. Carol and Derek would alternate leading the book club, tapping into her skills as a teacher and his as a broadcast interviewer. I would be a sort of writer-in-residence, offering comments on the authors’ styles and observing from the point of view of book selection. That suited me. I was shy by nature, and still particularly shy among the men given that it was only my third meeting.

  The atmosphere seemed a little off when we walked into the chapel for the book club meeting. None of the men had arrived. Something had happened at lunch. Then word came that Dread was in segregation. Dread was a private person and no one was saying what had landed him there. We sat and waited, hoping there wouldn’t be a lockdown.

  I reviewed a few pages of The Boy in the Moon. I’d just finished rereading it the previous night and images from it remained vividly in my mind. The book is about Brown’s search for answers concerning his son’s mysterious birth disorder, which turned out to be an extremely rare genetic condition known as cardiofaciocutaneous syndrome or CFC. Unable to speak or use the toilet, fed by a stomach tube, and given to punching himself in the head, Brown’s son, Walker, needed round-the-clock care because he didn’t sleep at night. He wore head protection and cylinders around his arms so that he couldn’t flex his elbows to smash himself. The description of Brown’s attempts to change and bathe Walker would be slapstick, if not so heartbreaking. For the first eight years of Walker’s life, neither Brown nor his wife, both prominent journalists, enjoyed two nights of sleep in a row, because they alternated staying up through the night with their son. Brown documents in deft, brutally honest and often humorous prose his despair, exhaustion, guilt and deep love for his son. I absolutely loved the book for its ability to capture all the oddities of this little boy with both a tenderness that was never maudlin and an outsized curiosity. Brown takes the time to try to understand what Walker loves in any given distraction: pawing a bag full of pop-can tabs or throwing things out the car window.

  Brown spends much of the book on a scientific quest to find out what is wrong with his son, then enters an acceptance phase, in which he tries to deal with the permanence of his family’s challenge and to learn what Walker is teaching him. As part of that journey, he, like Carol, visits Jean Vanier and his L’Arche community, where intellectually handicapped adults live with their caregivers in a homelike setting—the kind of environment Brown wanted for Walker in the long term. Since Carol’s own visit to Trosly was what sparked her idea for books clubs in prisons, this was a happy coincidence. Brown engages in a long philosophical conversation with Vanier, a bit like a consultation with a guru. Vanier celebrates the weak in society, and dials back society’s obsession with strength. It was a concept that appealed to me and I hoped the men would seize upon it.

  The book had won three high-profile literary prizes, and Carol and I were of one mind: this would be a huge hit with the guys, written by a man who was a guy’s guy. In fact, two of Brown’s previous books had been explorations of what it was to be a man.

  Finally, I could hear the sound of sneakers squeaking on linoleum down the hall. The men were coming: Frank, Graham, Ben, Grow-Op and a few others.You could r
ead from the brightness of their eyes that they were on alert. Carol and I looked at each other. Whatever was going on, we knew it was better not to ask. Better to get straight into the book.

  Carol asked simply how it was for them reading The Boy in the Moon.

  “I found the book sad,” said Frank. He told us that even Alfred Lansing’s Endurance, on explorer Ernest Shackleton’s ill-fated Antarctic expedition, had more hope than this book. It was a book that the club had read before I joined. “Through all those years,” he said, “Ian Brown wasn’t sure what was wrong with his son and it kind of left him up in the air.”

  Graham, the former biker, had been hard on Mortenson, the author of last month’s book, but his critique of Brown was even more cutting. He found the writer cold, and disliked the way he referred to his son as “the boy.” He continued, “Where the book asks about the value of a life like Walker’s because he’s often in pain, the next question is about the cost of Walker’s life to those around him. It seems to come back a lot to Ian Brown, and ‘What am I missing out on in my career’ or ‘What am I missing out on in my life.’”

  “Do you think that’s all right or are you saying Ian Brown is self-centred?” Carol asked Graham.

  “I think he’s entitled to consider the cost to himself,” said Graham. “But he used some terms that a lot of people would consider derogatory. I couldn’t get away from the fact that the gist of the book was that he felt burdened by having Walker.” Just as he had the previous month, Graham seemed to be drawing on a well-defined personal morality about what families should be.

  Frank agreed. “He was angry and resenting that he had a child like this. His wife accepted it more than he did.”

  Several other men felt the same way. One new member named George kept making the point that Brown had upper-middle-class advantages, intelligence, a good education and a good job and that he shouldn’t complain about the impact of Walker’s illness on his life. George talked about family friends of his who managed with an intellectually handicapped daughter. “She’s retarded and she shits herself,” he said. “Their life ain’t over. They don’t think about killing themselves.”

  So finally we’d come to the suicide thing in The Boy in the Moon. Brown writes that by the time Walker was two years old, he seldom thought of his son without also contemplating his own death and sometimes Walker’s death. He wonders about whether the years of caring for Walker would sap his affection for his wife and cause them both to fall ill. He writes frankly about imagining taking his son’s life and his own.

  Oddly, Brown’s murder-suicide musings are slightly comic. He imagines death by hypothermia on a winter hike in the mountains. But as he plays it through in his mind, he imagines the hassle of getting through the airport and to the mountain with all Walker’s gear and all his own ski equipment, and reasons that if he could do that, he could survive anything, making it unnecessary to commit suicide.

  Most of the guys dumped on Brown’s thoughts of death, branding him as “unstable” and “extremist.”And they wanted to understand the guilt the author expressed. “There’s something specific that he thinks he’s done and I was thinking there’s something he’s holding back,” said Graham, pointing to a radio interview with Brown that we played for the men before the discussion. In that clip Brown talked about the collective guilt of all parents of handicapped children because, he said, for thousands of years society has judged such defects as a sign that the parents have erred in some way. The shame trigger was hypersensitive among a number of the men in the book club. Many felt shame for compromising the lives of their loved ones and they anticipated shame in returning to their home communities and employment.

  Carol and I were knocked sideways by the men’s reactions. She and I were a little in awe of what Brown had managed to do as a parent, while working full-time.We had both seen how his ordeal had aged him. Brown had been an acquaintance of mine in university—a year or two ahead of me, and he now looked a decade older. But the guys were hard on him, harder than we could have predicted.

  Sloe-eyed, soft-hearted Ben was an exception. Ben was less troubled by Brown’s attitude toward his son and more drawn to the book’s philosophical inquiries. “Basically, transformation, strength and weakness—that’s what I took out of it,” he said.

  It was like a haiku response—so boiled-down it would be hard for an onlooker to figure out what the hell he was talking about. But from Ben’s word choice, I saw that he was picking up on the passage about Jean Vanier’s campaign to celebrate weakness in humankind, not strength—exactly what I’d hoped the men would discuss. It reminded me of one of my earliest lessons in love: to love people for their vulnerabilities more than for their strengths.

  “I put myself in his place,” said Ben. “Like what would you do?” He was trying to imagine himself as a parent in Brown’s situation. “At times it was kind of touching. I found he’s strong, because he’s just stripped away. The way he became raw with a lot of things. It took a lot for him to do this.”

  And Frank too: “I felt the desperation in his book.”

  I hadn’t seen empathy like this from prison book club members before. Here was the reaction that Carol and I had anticipated, or at least hoped for. We had often discussed the possibility that the process of stepping into the shoes of characters in books could encourage the development of empathy in the men.

  With that, we had exhausted the roster of members who had actually finished the book. Now it was up to Carol, Derek and me to broaden the discussion to include the others.

  Derek said that Brown was in a horrible situation but that he was absolutely honest about his feelings, and also funny. And with that we moved into laughing about one or two of the funnier anecdotes.

  He read aloud the passage in which Brown described Walker howling and hitting his head in a doctor’s waiting room while the other children were behaving well. We laughed and Carol said that we are all disabled in a sense, and that Brown and his son, Walker, had taught us not to be so afraid of our own silliness and imperfections.

  How appropriate, then, when one of the men came up to me at the end of the meeting, described himself as having bipolar disorder and gave me three poems that he’d written for my feedback, one of which spoke about his imperfections motivating him to overcome his darker thoughts. I promised to take his poems and bring back comments.

  About a week after the meeting, Carol phoned me to say that the men’s reactions to The Boy in the Moon were still on her mind. “It’s really given me pause,” she said. “We were asking the men to connect with a guy who comes from the same intellectual or social milieu as we do. But if anyone has met adversity, it’s these guys. The food is really meagre, they have five Counts a day, so they’re regimented. They don’t ever see a tree. The visits are very limited. They’re humiliated. They are crowded in with people they don’t necessarily want to be with. I think we need to be aware that we’re taking them out of their culture, which makes their responses very interesting.” The “Counts” she was referring to required inmates to return to their cells at several designated times each day to be counted by staff. I was beginning to know Carol well enough to recognize that this was no idle chat. She had decided that she had miscalculated with this book selection and that it wouldn’t happen again.

  Something else was niggling at her. Too many guys took a book and never reappeared at book club, or showed up at the meeting without having read the book. Watch out, I thought, she was going to start getting tough with the men. Sure enough, Carol wanted to appoint a cadre of book club “ambassadors” to recruit members and encourage current members to finish the book. Not the typical recruitment and enforcement that happened in the prison yard— recruitment and enforcement for a good cause.

  “I just want to be there when it happens,” I told her, curious about her bravado.

  The next book group had been scheduled to meet later that month, but was postponed until May because of a break in the water main at the pri
son. I had driven the two hundred and sixty kilometres to be there and a plumbing problem had botched it. Despite my disappointment I managed to joke to the prison chaplain before I drove back to Toronto that a water main without water would make a great tunnel. Everyone was aware that earlier that week about five hundred prisoners, mostly Taliban, had escaped from Sarposa Prison in Kandahar through a three-hundred-metre tunnel into a nearby house.

  When we reconvened in May, Carol issued a mea culpa that we had not anticipated the men’s reactions to The Boy in the Moon. “I’m sure that for you, Ian Brown, who had a nanny and access to all sorts of resources, wasn’t the man of courage that we saw him to be,” she said to the men. “What we’d like to say to you is that we really salute you for your courage, for getting through day by day in this place, with all of its challenges, many of which we don’t know. As well, many of you are making plans for your lives, and trying to keep that glimmer of hope up is a very courageous act.”There were murmurs of acknowledgment, and I could tell that she had won their hearts again.

  That month we were reading our second book about disability, but in the form of fiction. I had suggested The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by British writer Mark Haddon, for its journey into the mind of someone with what appeared to be autism spectrum disorder. The book is narrated with subject-predicate simplicity by Christopher Boone, a fifteen-year-old boy who has difficulty interpreting facial expressions and understanding idioms of language. He has an aptitude for math and science, and lives according to a strict routine in order to avoid sensory overload. But when Christopher finds his neighbour’s poodle impaled with a pitchfork, he travels outside his comfort zone to search for the killer, using the detective skills he has learned reading Sherlock Holmes mysteries. The boy’s investigations unveil some adult secrets at home and in his neighbourhood, including the fact that his mother is not dead, as his father has led him to believe. In fact, just about everything in adult life appears deceptive and irrational when viewed through the absolutely factual and literal lens of a person with autism or Asperger’s. And what made it worthy of the prison book club, I thought, was the book’s insights into the loneliness of a person who finds himself approaching the world differently than others.